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Ricky Ma had dreamed of designing a Scarlett Johansson robot since he was little. “When I was a child, I liked robots. There were Transformers, cartoons about robots fighting each other and games about robots. Naturally, this got me thinking about building a robotic Scarlett Johansson that could be folded into the shape of a car and fight other Scarlett Johansson robots.”

In violent rhetorical question news, experts at the Massive Internal Trauma (MIT) Technology Review are asking, “Industrial robots should be able to hurt their human coworkers, right? Who’s with me on this?”

Setting limits on the level of pain a robot may “accidentally” inflict on a human is a crucial goal, according to the Automatons for Flaying, Ligatures, and Crushing Internal Organs (AFL-CIO), the nation’s largest machine union. Existing guidance from regulators assumes that robots operate only when humans aren’t nearby, drastically reducing their opportunity to inflict pain on humans.

In apocalypse news, the New York Times is reporting that mad scientists working to bring about the robot apocalypse now get to have their own conference. A group of the world’s leading roboticists met at the Humanoids 2013 conference in Atlanta … Continue reading →

In raising-our-hopes news, NASA has announced that it has designed a new robotic exoskeleton to give astronauts “superhuman strength” on space flights. NASA also announced that their robotic exoskeleton would not give astronauts superhuman strength. One NASA project lead explained. “That’s … Continue reading →